In fact, the theme is so strong that Hollywood has built a whole genre around it –from Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, the terrific Ryan Gosling vehicle Half Nelson, to October Sky where an outcast Jake Gyllenhaal takes his fascination with amateur rockets all the way from the state science fair to a job at NASA.

And last week one of my favourite teachers was attacked. Professor Paul Redding was my honours thesis supervisor at the University of Sydney, and I also took a class of his on Hegel that I would happily describe as transformative.

But this humble, hardworking and globally recognised scholar had his work put on a shortlist of four Australian Research Council (ARC) grants that were described by Jamie Briggs, the head of the Coalition's Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee, as ‘those ridiculous research grants that leave taxpayers scratching their heads wondering just what the government was thinking’.

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Redding was not personally singled out for some error in his project or the way he researches or teaches. Instead, it's likely a junior Liberal staffer ran over the ARC list and, searching for anything that sounded foreign or didn’t relate to science, maths, or medicine, picked Paul's The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian idealism. It was easy to set his research up as somehow too abstract and a waste of money.

So what does Paul Redding do? Why should we pay for it?

They say that the man on the street can do philosophy. It’s true. The man on the street can also catch a ball and drive a car – that doesn't make him Derek Jeter or Juan Manuel Fangio.

Behind every political slogan is an argument. Stop the boats, for instance, fairly bluntly argues that there are limits to compassion.

And behind the argument behind the slogan is a philosophy.

Tony Abbott’s philosophy, touched on in his autobiography Battlelines and in exhaustively researched profiles like David Marr’s essay Political Animal, is fairly explicitly informed by a bit of B.A. Santamaria’s modern compassionate Catholicism mixed with some arch Thatcherism that rubbed off at Oxford.

Margaret Thatcher herself drew heavily on economist philosophers like Friedrich Hayek, who was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s second cousin and one of the first people to read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein’s ground breaking first book). Hayek took lectures in Aristotelian ethics, and read extensively of Ludwig Feuerbach, often described as the philosophical bridge between Hegel and Marx.

B.A. Santamaria was himself an arts student, and wrote a thesis that could easily have ended up on Jamie Briggs’ hit list, titled Italy Changes Shirts: The Origins of Italian Fascism. Santamaria’s influence on Abbott has meant that, as Chris Uhlmann wrote last year, ‘Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas echo [through Abbott’s politics]… it's arguable that some of his best political impulses are those shaped by a rich tradition of theology and philosophy.’

The truth is, scratch almost any major political leader and you start to find philosophers.

That is because philosophy is training for leadership.

Al Gore studied philosophy and phenomenology with an interest in Merleau-Ponty at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Pierre Trudeau, Prime minister of Canada for 15 years through two terms, was an intellectual influenced by philosophers such as Emmanuel Mounier, John Locke and David Hume. 17 Nobel Prize winners have studied philosophy, despite there being no specific prize for that discipline.

Anyone who can survive the complexities of modern political office is more often than not resourced with philosophy – and not the stuff you get in a two dollar book store, the serious stuff.

An IT consultant who has lost his Zetland investment apartment in a divorce reads Tony Robbins, a prime minister struggling to solve the intractable problems of the modern state reads Hegel.

Philosophy is not an easy subject nor some latte set cop out, it is the foundation and the dissection of all knowledge and is utterly painful to study.

I remember university law subjects as exercises in rote learning combined with a bit of horse-trading to get the best crib notes from older students. Legal reasoning involves dexterity and precision but it is at the end of the day a casual bun fight over how to define a few words and phrases in scraps of legislation and case law.

When a philosopher, like Martin Heiddeger for instance, rolls up his sleeves to argue the toss over the definition of words, what occurs is utterly different. Heidegger, the subject of another ridiculed ARC grant run by Dr Diego Bubbio at the University of Western Sydney, was a brilliant classicist able to describe the mutation of language from Ancient Greek philosophy to the present day.

He showed how words are very old tools that have been broken up and reassembled and reused, and how our confused and messy language is often not robust enough to talk through deep issues. Heidegger is insurance against the trickery of even the greatest rhetorician, against dogma in economics and science, against traps in language and traps in life.

Heiddeger's invented concept of zuhanden has influenced artificial intelligence, neuro-linguistic programming, hermeutics, cognitive science, every area of history and art, and continues to help people understand our interaction with technology.

Thinkers like Heidegger are capable of radically altering how you engage with the world – not just for a few weeks, but for the rest of your life. You don’t have to subscribe to a deity or follow a plan or give someone money – you just have to read a difficult book.

These difficult books are not going to make immediate sense to the man on the street, or even to academics outside the field.

But the same applies to high level research papers in economics or physics

Philosophy gets attacked because people think it’s impractical and doesn’t have a link to medicine or science or economics or our lives.

The truth is the opposite.

I remember studying Paul Redding’s course on Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. It was the clearest explanation of social institutions I had ever heard – how they are made and what they mean. Rather than rehearse the typical foundational myths, Redding’s patient teaching deciphered the project of democracy and society, and taught me more about the true obligations and responsibilities of citizenship than scouts and organised sport and years of private education in Catholic schools.

In my paper for that class I remember quoting James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and bonding with Redding over what a painful reminder Joyce's book was for anyone who had grown up in stultifying Catholic institutions full of guilt and doubt and misinformation.

I’ve carried that course with me ever since.

Philosophy is about including you, not excluding you. It attempts to overcome difference. It untangles knots and delivers us closer to each other.

It trains politicians to happily navigate the mythologies of public life.

So strange then to see politics turn on its humble and wise parent.

Let’s hope it was a moment of irrational exuberance in a hard fought election campaign.

After all, as John Howard said, a social conservative is supposed to be ‘someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather’.

15 comments

Wrong - philosophy is the most fun you can ever have with a clean book.

Commenter

Kane

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Date and time

September 09, 2013, 9:27AM

I studied the whole gamut of subjects at university level. And I put chemistry and philosophy on par for difficulty. Philosophy is definitely underrated.

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Les

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Date and time

September 09, 2013, 9:29AM

My undergrad degree included three years philosophy. I went on to study theology and education at postgrad level.

By trade I am a teacher.

Of all the things I studied, philosophy is the most enduringly useful and the most practical.

Philosophy gives a broad foundation and teaches clear thinking and clear communication. it sounds like we could use more of this in Australia, not less - and esp in Canberra.

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dave 51

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September 09, 2013, 9:42AM

Thank-you for a great article.

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JD

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September 09, 2013, 10:49AM

I have never studied philosophy but have done some reading and am attracted to those programs usually on ABC24 where somebody discusses things from a philosophical point of view. I see enormous benefits in understanding the basis of where we as individuals and at society levels came to have the points of view we do. I'm thinking about suggesting a beginners course in philosophy at work. Not sure how much support there will be but I'm absolutley sure there will be other like-minded people where I work. And I do think supporting people like Prof. Redding is fundamental to a healthy social and political framework, one we have been sorely lacking for many years.

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Kerry

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Melbourne

Date and time

September 09, 2013, 10:55AM

We can expect little better from populist politicians willing to ride the rail of ignorance into office. Philosophers (if not academics in general) and refugees alike are easy targets, having few votes on the one hand and none on the other, even though the nation has immeasurably benefited from both.

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davros

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September 09, 2013, 11:31AM

Great article! Speaking of the power of language, there are some 'women on the street' too.

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Ruby

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Sydney

Date and time

September 09, 2013, 11:38AM

Given that the ally of a politician with things to hide is an ignorant public, it is hardly difficult to imagine that a well trained public or certain members of the public who are trained in critical thinking would be considered to be in opposition to the politician's interests.

The world would be a much different place is people were well versed in Philosophy. Oh well. Let's go and cheer on the football and complain about the muslims again. Also, I hear we potentially have a senator now who will be tackling big hitting issues like muffler volumes on bikes and so on...so, there's that. Excuse me while I go and hit my head against a wall until this country starts to make sense.

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Tim the Toolman

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September 09, 2013, 1:20PM

Apart from the general comments about the significance of philosophy, which I concur with, it is worth pointing out that 40% of the score for the assessment of an ARC grant application comes from research outputs - applicants are required to list their "recent significant publications" as well as their "ten career-best publications". Both must be cross-referenced to previous ARC grants.

An applicant who has performed poorly on either of these criteria is unlikely to get funding. Clearly Professor Redding must have made a convincing case, as judged by the anonymous experts who would have assessed his application - evidently he is a fine scholar.

I wish that politicians would make even a minimal effort to understand this before commenting in public...

Commenter

Dr Kiwi

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September 09, 2013, 3:18PM

You're spot on. As someone who is in Research Management I can tell you that there is much more to these grants than first meets the eye when you see the title of the project - I see this a lot. Additionally, as an educated person (no, I have not studied philosophy), I despair for the populist view that by slashing and burning all research not deemed to meet a very narrow political agenda, that it will set back so much that is important. All forms of knowledge are important.

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